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ABSTRACT

Immigrants' perceptions of discrimination (PD) correlate strongly with various political outcomes, including group consciousness and partisan identity. Here, we examine the hypothesis that immigrants' PD vary across US localities, as threatened responses by native-born residents may increase perceived discrimination among neighboring immigrants. We also consider the alternative hypothesis that barriers to the expression and detection of discrimination decouple native-born attitudes from immigrants' perceptions about their treatment. We test these claims by analyzing three national surveys of almost 11,000 first-generation Latino, Asian, and Muslim immigrants. The results indicate that immigrants' PD hardly vary across localities. While anti-immigrant attitudes are known to be geographically clustered, immigrants' PD prove not to be. This mismatch helps us narrow the potential causes of perceived discrimination, and it suggests the value of further research into perceived discrimination's consequences for immigrants' social and political incorporation.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of the Russell Sage Foundation, with special appreciation to Aixa Cintrón-Vélez. We thank Alexandra Bozheva, Katherine Foley, Patrick Gavin, and Sheng Wei Gu for valuable research assistance, Rahsaan Maxwell for feedback and preliminary analyses of the British Citizenship Survey, and Karthick Ramakrishnan for assistance in obtaining geographic identifiers for the National Asian American Survey. We further appreciate feedback from Justin Grimmer, Clayton Nall, Francisco Pedraza, and Gary Segura. This research was previously presented at the Russell Sage Cultural Contact and Immigration Working Group (April 2011), at Stanford University (September 2011), at the Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration Consortium at Claremont Graduate University/Pitzer College (October 2012), at Princeton University (October 2012), and at Georgetown University's Political Economy Lunch (November 2012). We also acknowledge the Inter-university Consortium on Political and Social Research, the Pew Research Center, and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life for access to data sets with restricted geographic identifiers. The views expressed herein are those of the authors alone.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Funding

This research was supported by a Presidential Authority Award from the Russell Sage Foundation.